The pages down the right hand side comprise an essay in defence of panexperientialism and should be read in order.

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The Concept of Self

This is a muddled
concept that demands some analysis if the confusion is to be cleared away. It
has been divided below into four distinct concepts, the first of which has
already been introduced:

1.
The Self as the Person

The notion
of "self-as-person" was introduced in the section above entitled
"Subjective and Objective". This is the notion of self as a member of
the category known as "people", or more specifically as the conceived
human organism in its habitat. Note that (i) the idea of the field of
experience, (ii) the idea of the self-as-person (the human organism
associated with the field of experience), and (iii) the problematic association
between these two ideas (the mind/body problem), are all constituents of the
field of experience. However, the broader unqualified concept of “self” is
complicated by other ideas that also appear as constituents of the field of
experience, namely the "subject of consciousness" and the "agent
of action".

2.
The Self as the Subject of Consciousness

There is
an innate idea of “being a subject” over and against the objects
that constitute the field of experience, the subject being “that which is
experiencing” the constituents of that field. However, this idea is but another
constituent of the field of experience, and the question arises as to how this
idea might be accounted for. The main problem is that the constituents of the
field of experience are in constant flux, and there is no single entity amongst
those constituents that could possibly qualify as the “enduring subject”. One
approach to this problem is to propose that the subject is a metaphysical
entity existing in some putative domain “beyond” the field of experience. Another
approach is to conclude that this idea is an innate misconception and to seek a
possible source for the misconception.

Whatever
the mechanism by which this idea is generated, the idea complicates the useful concept
of self-as-person by accreting upon it the idea of self-as-experiencer
(or as the “subject of consciousness”); more specifically the idea of a
“something” that somehow experiences the field of experience. No such
object appears amongst the constituents of the field of experience, and neither
does anything that does appear amongst those constituents give any
grounds for such a concept. The idea that one portion of the constituents of
experience somehow “experiences” another portion of those constituents is
difficult to sanction, and also raises the question of how there can be any
experience of the experiencing portion itself - i.e. the idea of an experiencer
entails an infinite regress known as the “homunculus problem”. Note that
rejecting as a misconception the idea of self-as-experiencer would eliminate to
the notion of direct acquaintance with the constituents of experience
(or immediate knowledge of them), since there would then be nothing
other than the constituents of experience for which any such relationship could
obtain. The upshot would be that there is no “observer” of subjective
experiences, since the term “observer” would then only pertain to the
self-as-person in respect of empirical data concerning its environment. (Note
that this would be consistent with the foregoing rejection of the possibility
of a “science of consciousness”.)

3.
The Self as the Agent of Action

Objective
biological processes are sufficient to account for much of our behaviour - e.g.
eating, drinking, procreating, avoiding injury, etc. Not only are such "biological
drives" accompanied by subjective sensations (e.g. hunger, thirst,
pleasure, pain, etc.), but they are also accompanied by a conviction
that this correlation between the biological drive and the associated
subjective sensation is causal in nature - i.e. I eat because I’m
hungry, drink because I’m thirsty, etc. That is to say that I consider
myself to be something more than just an organism in its habitat - a something
that can envisage possible future outcomes, that has preferences in regard to
those possible outcomes, and that directs the organism to behave in a manner
that aims to meet those preferences. So when I say “I lift my arm” I mean
something more than merely that the self-as-person (the conceived organism)
lifts its arm, since there is a conviction that this “I” (the something
more than just the organism in its habitat) is an active process that
intervenes in what would otherwise be an entirely automatic process. There is a
conviction that this “I” receives information from sense organs,
processes it in conjunction with stored information, and issues outputs that
direct the activity of the organism's skeletal muscles.

This “I”,
then, is conceived in such a manner that, given prevailing conditions, it has
the capacity to envisage a number of possible future outcomes and to cause the
organism to behave in such a way as to favour some preferred subset of those
outcomes, and this mode of behaviour might usefully be referred to as "willing",
or more commonly "the will". Consistent with this idea of being something
more than just a biological machine, we have a propensity to speak of our conscious
decisions in contrast to our automatic (or unconscious) actions, as
though consciousness were some kind of active participant in our
behaviour (in contrast to the way the word is being used in this document).
Moreover, this way of thinking implies that this active “consciousness”
is in some sense “free” of the dictates of the organism’s otherwise automatic
responses, thereby rendering “me” an agent rather than just a biological
machine. So, conceptually at least, “I” (as agent) can choose a course of
action that favours some preferred future outcome.

The fly in
the ointment here is the provenance of “my preferences.” It would seem that
these preferences are determined by (i) membership to a particular species
(human instincts), (ii) personal history (conditioning), and (iii) the ability
to work from premises to conclusions (reasoning). Of these three categories of
behaviour, it would seem that only the third category is a suitable candidate
for the term “conscious deliberation” and therefore a suitable candidate for
the activity of the agent. But given that my ability to work from premises to
conclusions permits me to envisage possible future consequences of my behaviour
and to behave in a manner that favours one such outcome, that conclusion still
fails to account for my preference for a specific outcome. If the only
way such preferences can be accounted for is in terms of instincts and
conditioning, then reasoning is just an extension of these automatic biological
processes and operates in accordance with those processes. Indeed the reasoning
process itself, rather than conferring some kind of “freedom”, would appear to
be a constraint on behaviour, preventing the organism from behaving
inappropriately with regard to future outcomes (otherwise this “freedom” would
reduce to randomness and would fail to account for the orderliness of our
"willed" actions).

The
conceived “self-as-agent” in this process seems to be redundant. If this is the
case then the “conscious” of our “conscious decisions” implies nothing more
than (i) that reasoning is a process that is active within the field of
experience, and (ii) that reasoning is ascribed therein to a “reasoner” (or
“thinker”) that is conceived as being distinct from the organism
(self-as-person). But this conceptual divorce of "the reasoner" from
the organism has no solid foundation - it is the organism that reasons,
and so the notion of self-as-agent would appear to be nothing over and above the
self-as-person. The conceived distinction would be an innate misconception,
along with the innate notion of any metaphysical “freedom” with regard to the
will. But given this innate idea of the autonomous agent, the idea becomes a
drive in itself known colloquially as "selfishness" (whether of the
"zero sum" variety, or of the "win-win" variety otherwise
known as "enlightened self-interest"). This view challenges our idea of
altruism, and our notion of "selflessness" is called into question.
It would then be conceivable that a variant use of the term
"selflessness" might pertain to a state in which this misconception (of
the self-as-agent) has become so eroded that it no longer influences the
organism's behaviour.

To recap,
there is an innate notion a self-as-agent; more specifically a something
that somehow causes the actions of the associated person (or some subset
of the actions, given that much of our behaviour is blatantly automatic). But
no such object appears as a constituent of the field of experience, and neither
does anything that does appear amongst those constituents give any
grounds for such a concept. (This is consistent with work initially carried out
by Benjamin Libet and supported by a great deal of subsequent work by other
investigators.) Some people fear that in relinquishing the metaphysical concept
of free will (as it appears in the guise of the agent of action) we are
forced into accepting the unpalatable or even abhorrent (as it may seem to
them) metaphysical view known as determinism, but this is a
misconception. The absence of metaphysical free will does not necessarily
entail that the world is unfolding deterministically, since all indications are
that there is a level of indeterminism at the atomic and subatomic
levels (e.g. the stochastic element introduced when a quantum object undergoes
an interaction after a period of non-interaction with any other quantum
object). But this caveat is often insufficient to placate such individuals, and
their objection might better be considered to pertain to predestination
rather than to determinism.

Since it
is not at all clear how the stochastic element introduced by quantum systems
could possibly give rise to the kind of ordered behaviour that is
characteristic of their conception of freewill, some people speculate
that quantum mechanical indeterminism may leave open a “back door” by which
such a self-as-agent might possibly influence the self-as-person. This
would be to invoke the notion of a metaphysical subject just as may be done in
the case of the self-as-experiencer covered in the preceding section.

4.
The Self as the Field of Experience

It seems,
then, that the idea of the agent of action and the idea of the subject
of consciousness have been accreted onto the concept of the self-as-person,
adding nothing useful for the person. The only reasons for retaining these two
ideas would seem to be psychological in origin rather than that of conferring
any explanatory value. But another idea of self remains to be considered, and
this is the idea of self as the entire field of experience. Whereas the idea of
self-as-person has pragmatic value for the organism, the idea of self as field
of experience has no such value since the idea of the field of experience
itself has no pragmatic value. Note that this notion of self is consistent with
the idea that consciousness is inessential for all practical purposes, but
it cannot be claimed that the idea of self as the field of experience might be
grounded in a misconception since the existence of the field of experience is
beyond doubt (any such doubt would itself be a constituent of the field of
experience). We would simply be giving a short name to the field of experience,
albeit a name that invites confusion because of the already extant uses of the
word "self". However, this would be consistent with a certain
interpretation of the following passages in Wittgenstein's Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus:

5.63 I am my world (the microcosm.)5.631 There is no such thing as the subject that thinks or entertains
ideas. [...]5.632 The subject does not belong to the world: rather, it is a limit of
the world.5.641 Thus there really is a sense in which philosophy can talk about
the self in a non-psychological
way. What brings the self into philosophy is the fact that 'the world is my world'. The philosophical self is not
the human being, not the human
body, or the human soul, with which psychology deals, but rather the metaphysical subject, the limit
of the world – not a part of it.

Furthermore, this would also be consistent
with a certain interpretation of the following passages in Wittgenstein's Philosophical
Investigations:

398: "But when I imagine
something, or even actually see objects, I have got something
which my neighbour has not." - I
understand you. You want to look about you and say: "At any rate only I
have got THIS." - What
are these words for? They serve no purpose. - May one not add: "There is here no question of a 'seeing' - and therefore none of a 'having' - nor of a subject, nor therefore
of 'I' either"? Might I not ask: In what sense have you got what
you are talking about and saying that only you have got it? Do you possess it?
You do not even see it. Must you not really say that no one has got
it? And this too is clear: if as a matter of logic you exclude other people's
having something, it loses its sense to say that you have it.

[...] I think we can say: you are
talking (if, for example, you are sitting in a room) of the 'visual room'. The
'visual room' is the one that has no owner. I can as little own it as I can
walk about it, or look at it, or point to it. Inasmuch as it cannot be any one
else's it is not mine either. In other words, it does not belong to me because
I want to use the same form of expression about it as about the material room
in which I sit. The description of the latter need not mention an owner, in
fact it need not have any owner. But then the visual room cannot have
any owner. "For" - one
might say - "it has no master,
outside or in." [...]

399: One might also say: Surely
the owner of the visual room would have to be the same kind of thing as it
is; but he is not to be found in it, and there is no outside.

400: The 'visual room' seemed
like a new discovery, but what its discoverer really found was a new way of
speaking, a new comparison; it might even be called a new sensation.

404: [...] What does it mean to
know who is in pain? It means, for example, to know which man in this
room is in pain [...]. What am I getting at? At the fact that there is a great
variety of criteria for personal 'identity'. Now which of them
determines my saying that 'I' am in pain? None.

411: Consider how the following
questions can be applied, and how settled:

(1) "Are these books my
books?"

(2) "Is this foot my
foot?"

(3) "Is this body my
body?"

(4) "Is this sensation my
sensation?"

[...]

(4) Which sensation does one mean
by 'this' one? That is: how is one using the demonstrative pronoun
here? Certainly otherwise than in, say, the first example! Here confusion
occurs because one imagines that by directing one's attention to a sensation
one is pointing to it.